Jasmine ross dr. sterling claypoolegene

1. Jasmine Ross
Dr. Sterling Claypoole
General Psychology
February 25, 2021
In essence, flashbulb memories relate to the vivid, as well as
consistent memories we experience and that relate to a
personally significant and emotional event. This kind of
memory is so detailed that it includes where we were and what
we were doing at that particular point in time when the event
occurred to us. Analogically, it can be related to a photograph
taken and stored in our memories and which we reminisce the
very emotions we had at that point in time (Bernstein, 2016).
It is important to note that everyday events do not end up being
classified as our flashbulb memories. For a historical event to
be categorized as a flashbulb memory, then the vent must have
captured our very attention and must have evoked strong
personal emotions as well as connections. This kind of strong
cultural connection to the event gives rise to a strong emotional
reaction. Also, it is important to note that while many

2. individuals may experience the same event, the development of
the personal cultural connections, and strong emotional
reactions thereafter, develops differently for different
individuals (Bernstein, 2016).
Altogether, regardless of our individual connections to the
event, each person’s flashbulb memory has vivid details of the
event. The remembrance of these details comes with so much
ease to everyone who has a flashbulb memory. While these
memories may have more details than memories of everyday
events, the details of flashbulb memories may not be completely
accurate (Bernstein, 2016).
At a personal level, I could think of instances in the past that
have led to my flashbulb memories. One such instance was
when my parents renewed their marriage vows just a few years
ago. I remember sitting on the church bench and seeing them
rekindle the love that had been there for so many years in the
past; I could not help but think of how blissful it must be for
people to be together for that long and still commit to each
other for the years to come (Bernstein, 2016).
References
Bernstein, A, D. (2016). Psychology: Foundatio ns and
Frontiers. Cengage Learning.
Problem Statement
Ridematching programs started relocating to the Web within the
late 1990s.[17] A 2006 report by the Government Travel
Organization of the Joined together States Office of
Transportation expressed that "another day" responsiveness has
been accomplished but that "energetic" ridematching has not
however been effectively implemented.[18] In 2009, Uber was
established as Ubercab by Garrett Camp, a computer software
engineer and the co-founder of StumbleUpon, and Travis
Kalanick, who sold his Ruddy Swoosh startup for $19 million in
2007.[19] In 2011, Sidecar propelled; its author Sunil Paul

3. protected the thought of hailing a ride through portable app in
2002.[20] Lyft was propelled within the summer of 2012 by
computer software engineers Logan Green and John Zimmer as
a benefit of Zimride, an intercollegiate carpooling company
they established in 2007.[21] Careem began operations in July
2012.[22] In 2013, California got to be the primary state to
direct such companies; they are controlled as open utilities by
the California Open Utilities Commission.
The spread of the coronavirus turned out to be such an
unusually rapid phenomenon that many countries and their
economies were so unprepared for such a turn of events.
Although the passenger transportation industry is not the most
important and critical sector of the economy, it has greatly
influenced the daily life of ordinary citizens of the country,
greatly restricting movement within the boundaries of large
cities. The Coronavirus pandemic has hit many sectors of the
economy of all countries hard. One of these industries turned
out to be the transportation of passengers in the person of Uber
or Lift.
When COVID-19 first began, people who were panicky began to
fear being infected, this is not without reason, since the virus
could remain on the surface for about three days. And using the
services of an Uber or Lift posed a great risk both for
passengers and for the drivers themselves. The management of
these companies did not immediately take measures to combat
this and they had to temporarily stop providing their services.
"Ride-hailing rivals Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.
suspended shared-ride services Tuesday as COVID-19 spreads
across the world, and their stocks dipped despite a rebound for
the markets overall (Owens, 2020).
As mentioned above, many areas have suffered losses due to the
pandemic. Uber did not stand aside. “Uber lost $1.1 billion over
the last three months, with its adjusted net revenues down 20
percent compared to the third quarter of 2019”. (Hawkins, 2020)
Many people lost their jobs during the pandemics, although they
could have gone and worked for an Uber or Lyft to pay their

4. bills, but this option has also become unavailable due to
COVID-19. And the drivers themselves could not earn as before
to pay their mortgages and loans. All since the demand for their
services fell and the state introduced strict restrictions on taxi
policy. People did not want to risk their health and the health of
their loved ones. Also, many drivers borrowed their cars to
work on Uber, and they found themselves in difficult situations.
The car is idle and does not make a profit and loses in price, but
the loan must be paid for. Since the WHO introduced new
recommendations and urged people to stay at home and close
businesses, many drivers watched their incomes fall, since
before the pandemic, about 1.3 million people used taxi services
in the world. In a poll conducted by RIDE Share guy who
focuses on drivers, it was said that about 80% of Uber drivers
reported that their income was reduced due to the pandemic.
"COVID-19 has also impacted the sales of ride-sharing
companies... "Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft have
seen their ride businesses plummet, primarily due to the
coronavirus pandemic. So, it doesn't seem like that's changing,
based on the third-quarter earnings of the companies. However,
stock prices have seen only small declines, ranging from 2
percent to 5 percent declines, with Uber and Lyft retaining a
positive tone and expecting profitability in the not-so-distant
future.
Research Question: What impact has Covid had on the ride
share industry and how can the industry adapt to continue to
provide the service to customers?
References
Owens J., (2020). Uber and Lyft suspend shared rides due to
COVID-19; stocks decline despite market rebound.Retrieved
from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-and-lyft-
suspend-shared-rides-due-to-covid-19-stocks-decline-despite-
rebound-2020-03-17.
This Uber driver made $600 a week before the coronavirus
outbreak — now he makes $0. Retrieved from

5. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/28/uber-drivers-struggle-to-
find-income-amid-coronavirus-pandemic.html
Literature Review
Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health
Organization on March 11, 2020; two days later, on the 13th of
March, the United States was put under a National Emergency
status (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC],
2020), which triggered individual states’ lockdowns. Since then,
a number of things have changed in our daily routines; some in
the form of temporary measures during the lockdowns (for
example, store closures and reduced customer capacity) and
some in the form of new habits that started to form as a
necessity, such as the switch of office employees to work-from-
home (WFH) mode and the adoption of Zoom as the major tool
of communication.
T. Arcaris reminds that, “remote work isn't necessarily a new
thing; according to the US Bureau of Labor, 15% of Americans
worked remotely at least one day per week in 2018. But most
companies lacked the technology and protocol necessary to
deploy remote employees at scale”. Covid-19 came to accelerate
a process that was already underway, albeit slow, toward more
online education and remote work (Penrod, E., 2020).
Stanford Economist N. Bloom, who has been studying WFH
since 2014, ran a survey last May to find out that 42% of
Americans had switched to WFH within the first couple of
months of pandemic-related lockdowns (Bloom, N., 2020). For
this research, Bloom looked at full-time workers between the
ages of 20 and 64 who were earning more than $20,000
annually, and who were thereby weighted by state, industry and
income. Using these employees’ 2019 earnings as an indicator
of their contribution to the US GDP, he concluded that WFH
accounted for more than two thirds of all economic activity
taking place in the country (Bloom, N., 2020). This allows us

6. to understand the impact of WFH on the economy and its
importance in the fight against the pandemic.
But what are the industries where employees are being
“allowed” to work remotely? As Bloom notes, “not everyone
can work from home. Only 51% of the survey respondents –
mostly managers, professionals and financial workers who can
carry out their jobs on computers – reported being able to work
from home at an efficiency rate of 80% or more. The remaining
(nearly) half cannot work remotely” (Bloom, N., 2020).
According to A. Bartik and his team of colleagues at Harvard,
industries with more educated workers exhibited higher levels
of remote work and suffered less productivity loss than in
industries with less educated employees. This can be explained
and reinforced by the fact that, while knowledge-based work by
professionals and business service providers lends itself to be
performed remotely, front-line work or factory-related
manufacturing areas or even fields like hospitality cannot be
easily and massively adapted to a different work format. In this
respect, the fields of education, finance and scientific/technical
services were the industries that jumped right in adopting WFH
practices, but this was not the case for agriculture, food services
and logistics companies, who had no way to switch (Bartik,
A.W. et al, 2020).
With remote work spanning a great number of industries and
becoming an increasingly staple part of the labor landscape, the
need to define it and identify benefits, drawbacks and
implications becomes more essential than ever.
WFH employees report a long list of benefits that come wi th the
new situation, but perhaps the most appreciated of all, is freeing
themselves from their daily commute. According to a 2019
analysis by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute reported by
the New York Times, the average American spends 54 hours per
year in the car in order to commute to work (Cramer, M. and
Zaver, M., 2020). Moreover, time spent in the car –especially
during rush hour traffic – is associated with elevated levels of
stress, depression and aggressive driving behavior (Bitkina, O.

7. V. et al, 2020). Driving stress can be experienced at various
levels: at the psychological level, it can lead to anxiety,
frustration with work and lack of control; at the cognitive level,
it can bring about feelings of helplessness and poor tolerance; at
the physical level it can elevate blood pressure and body
temperature; while at the social level it can promote job
searching and foster lack of motivation (Lalithashree G., 2019).
Covid quarantine days also came with another benefit; saving
money by reducing expenses. This was a direct benefit to
everyone involved, regardless of their work status, but WFH
employees seem to have benefited more than every category,
since paychecks were still coming in, while expenses related to
commuting and childcare were drastically reduced. According to
a Global Workplace Analytics study, employees who work
remotely half of the week can save between $2,500 and $4,000
per year, while this amount becomes even larger in the case of
full-time WFH, which offers workers the possibility to move to
cheaper, more distant areas (Lister, K., 2020). WFH can also
potentially bring forth tax benefits, if considered as a long-term
option; employees who choose to do so, may be able to claim a
home office tax deduction in their income taxes, depending on
their home’s square footage and the nature of their work (Baker,
J., 2020).
Finally, this recent six-month WFH experiment proved one
more thing: productivity was (surprisingly) not sacrificed in the
face of convenience. WFH provided workers with the
opportunity to follow a more flexible schedule, determining
their own work hours and creating their own workspace to
include pets, leisure clothing and background noises, if desired.
According to evidence from VPN providers cited by Bloomberg,
wake-up times for WFH employees have shifted later, while it’s
not uncommon for workers to log in and respond to emails even
late at night. Providers report that they have seen spikes in
usage from midnight to 3am, which were not present before the
pandemic (Davis, M.F. and Green, J., 2020). According to T.
Arcari, “tasks must be completed and meetings attended, but

8. nobody expects remote employees to be actively online and tied
to a desk from eight in the morning to six at night” (Penrod, E.,
2020). What is expected from them, however, is attendance.
Especially during the lockdown period, excuses to not attend
meetings or conferences were simply not available, a fact which
contributed to a boost in meeting attendance in the recent
months (Quenqua, D., 2020).
While one would expect WFH employees to feel too
comfortable and potentially too distracted in the own
environment to be productive, studies suggest the opposite.
Prodoscore, a California-based company offering employee
visibility software, compared 100 million data points from its
30,000 US-based users to data from the same period in the year
before, to find out that telephone calling was increased to
230%; Customer Relationship Management system activity was
up 176%; email activity was increased by 57%; and chat
messages were up 9%. Overall, the company tracked a jump in
worker productivity which amounted to a whopping 47%. “The
common assumption is that remote workers are less productive
than those who are in a traditional office. But our ability to
capture, integrate, and analyze workplace data shows
otherwise,” said C. Hajibrahim, Chief Product Officer at
Prodoscore (BusinessWire, 2020). Another study, run by
DeFilippis et al., explored the impact of COVID-19 on
employee's digital communication patterns in 16 large
metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle
East which were under mandated lockdowns. What they found
were increases in the number of meetings per person and the
number of attendees per meeting, but decreases in the average
length of meetings, as compared to the pre-pandemic levels.
Their research also revealed significant and durable increases in
length of the average WFH workday, which increased by 8.2%,
or 48.5 minutes, along with short-term increases in email
activity. (DeFilippis, E. et al, 2020).
A study conducted by N. Bloom in 2014 had somehow foreseen
this trend; in his experiment, Bloom worked with a Chinese

9. online travel agency to study remote-work productivity, by
allowing employees to work from home four days a week. The
experiment was driven by the need of the company to lower
real-estate costs, as office space in Shanghai was very
expensive, without sacrificing on performance. Surprisingly,
Bloom’s findings indicated a 13% increase in productivity for
the remotely working group, as compared to the group of office-
based employees over the span of nine months.
Before jumping to the conclusion, however, that WFH is the
trend of the future, all the drawbacks associated with it have to
be carefully spelled out and, where possible, dealt with.
One obvious part is that, for remote work to be productive,
certain requirements will have to be met; first and foremost is
the need for good connection to the internet, while others
include a quiet place to work from and company tech support
and equipment. These are not to be taken for granted, however;
in the case of Bloom’s research, over 50% of those who were
surveyed reported working from shared rooms or their
bedrooms, while only 65% of responders felt their internet was
fast enough to support Zoom meetings (Wong, M. 2020). These
statistics make it clear that working from home is by far a
privilege, fostering concealed underlying inequalities in terms
of socioeconomic status. As Bloom himself put it: “this is
generating a time bomb for inequality. Our results show that
more educated, higher-earning employees are far more likely to
work from home – so they are continuing to get paid, develop
their skills and advance their careers. At the same time, those
unable to work from home – either because of the nature of
their jobs, or because they lack suitable space or internet
connections – are being left behind. They face bleak prospects
if their skills and work experience erode during an extended
shutdown and beyond” (Wong, 2020).
Another phenomenon that emerged as a result of office staff
switching to WFH mode, is “Zoom fatigue”; a term first coined
by BBC to describe a general burnt-out and overwhelming
feeling brought forth by additional focus required during video

10. calls, as opposed to face-to-face interaction (Jiang, M., 2020).
As the pandemic put a stop to gatherings, whether in the office
context, or elsewhere, people had to turn to software meeting
solution tools, like Zoom, Hangouts, Webex and others in order
to coordinate projects, conduct meetings or even attend classes.
Video conferencing allowed business to keep operating and
became an essential tool during lockdowns. As CNBC reports,
video conferencing service daily users spiked to 200 million in
March, up from 10 million in December (Evans, D. 2020).
According to G. Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead,
that explores sustainable learning and development in the
workplace, people’s brains need to work harder during Zoom
calls in order to process and interpret non-verbal cues, such as
body language, voice pitch and facial expressions. As
employees attend remote meetings and do not gather around the
same table, participants need to devote extra energy to pick up
the moods of their colleagues. In the same sense, it gets hard to
attribute meaning to pauses or delays, in the remote context.
While, for example, silence would not necessarily be
overbearing in the face-to-face environment, in the Zoom
context, it triggers anxiety about potential connectivity issues
and upcoming freezes (Jiang, M., 2020). In addition, and in
sharp contrast to most physical get-togethers, Zoom brings the
image of each participant in the forefront, creating a “mirror”
effect, which leads participants to being constantly self-aware.
As M. Shuffler, an associate professor, who studies workplace
wellbeing and teamwork effectiveness at Clemson
University, noted: “When you're on a video conference, you
know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there
comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform.
Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful”
(Jiang, M., 2020). Finally, Zoom has its own “logic” when it
comes to tiles arrangements; which essentially means no
participant can control their place in the grid. Zoom says they
order of meeting attendees in a first-come first-served order,
depending on whose video was turned on at the time they

11. joined. When the camera gets turned off, the user gets moved to
the end of the grid and, if a group is too big to fit on one page,
most recent speaker are placed onto the first page, replacing
less active participants (Morris, B., 2020). This changes the
dynamics of the office and cancels the implicit leadership of the
power speaker / head of the table leader that used to dominate
face-to-face conferences.
For reasons like the one just mentioned above, remote work has
resulted to an unquestionable change in the culture of the
(redefined) office. WFH comes with the isolation that the
pandemic was trying to impose; but workplaces are social,
buzzing networking spaces, with ever-evolving personal and
professional relationships which often define the outcome of the
work and the success of a project. According to Lynda Grattan,
a professor at London Business School who specializes in the
future of work, says that in many offices “quite a lot of the
ways that we make decisions in organizations aren't made in
meetings. They're made in the corridors” (Lufkin, B., 2020).
The new office will need to redefine collaboration between
employees and managers and will require some sort of
replication of unstructured interactions of the office in order to
help employees feel part of a coherent team. As former IBM
CEO L. Gerstner puts it, “Culture isn't just one aspect of the
game - it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing
more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”
(CityBusiness Guest Perspective, 2020).
Where culture has resulted to severe impediments, is in
workplaces where managers (perhaps of a more authoritarian
style) were under the belief that WFH allows employees to slack
around, hurts productivity and hinders innovation (Barkin, D.,
2020). Allowing staff to work remotely cannot be achieved
without trust; it is perhaps the most vital component that
separates strong organizations from weaker ones. Atkinson &
Burger (2020) point out that “Cultures don't just evolve. Strong
positive cultures must be led and nurtured”. And that’s the
challenge for the future leader – developing, fostering and

12. implementing a positive culture that will promote the
organization’s performance, effectiveness, personnel retention
and, ultimately, growth (Atkinson, P., & Burger, D., 2020).
There is, however, one factor that, in the case of Bloom’s 2014
experiment, led employees to request they return to their
offices: Social isolation. J. Olson, a professor of informatics at
the University of California, who has been studying "distance
work" for about 30 years, notes that “It's easy to feel like you
have disappeared from the heart of the company, missing out on
the casual chats and the important decisions” (Berliner, U.,
2020). For Bloom, the solution to this lies in the golden
medium.“A good rule of thumb”, he notes, “is to let employees
have one to two days a week at home. It’s hugely beneficial to
their well-being, helps you attract talent, and lowers attrition”
(Bloom, N., 2014). This solution would also help establish face-
to-face communication lines with co-workers and supervisors in
order to promote team cohesion.
All the above beg for the question of what’s in store for the
future. Are we in a point of no return when it comes to remote
work or are we all going back to the familiarity of a structured
workplace after the Covid threat is over?
This pandemic certainly removed the “stigma” associated with
WFH. N. Bloom has stated that, before the pandemic, he would
often hear comments like “working from home is shirking from
home,” or “working remotely is remotely working” (Bloom, N.,
2020). With 42% of the population working from home and
keeping the economy moving, this notion of slacking from home
no longer exists. According to a research from the Federal
Research of Atlanta, WFH is expected to triple post-Covid in
comparison to pre-Covid levels. With firms interviewed noting
that about 10% of their full-time employees worked from home
at least one day a week in 2019, the research team expect this
number to jump to nearly 30% after the crisis ends. (Altig, D. et
al., 2020). This pandemic-imposed experiment forced
businesses to try the WFH pill and some found it enticing,
especially considering the real estate benefit of paying for less

13. office space, the added bonus of increased productivity and the
elimination of call-outs due to extreme weather or mild
sickness.
But, what would employees choose, if they were given the
option? Obviously, WFH is not for everyone, and different
people perform differently under different conditions. What
Bloom found out during his 2004 China experiment, was that
people who have established social lives—older workers,
married workers, parents – were more eager to assume WFH
positions. In contrast, younger workers’ social lives were more
connected to the office and tended to not want to work from
home as much (Bloom N., 2014). According to a recent survey
by Robert Half, 74% of remote workers said they would like to
have the option to continue working remotely after the
restrictions are lifted (Penrod, E., 2020). And Global Workplace
Analytics estimates that 25-30% of the workforce will be
working-from-home multiple days a week by the end of 2021,
noting that “the longer people are required to work at home, the
greater the adoption we will see when the dust settles” (Lister,
K., 2020).